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All Our Relations | Excerpt
From Chapter 2, Seminoles: At the Heart of the Everglades
Where the
natural world ends and the human world begins, there you will find the Seminoles.
There is no distinction between the two worlds-the Creator's Law governs all.
It has always been like that, since the beginning.
"The Creator made our people and gave us the laws on how we're supposed to conduct ourselves," explains Danny Billie, spokesperson for the Independent Traditional Seminole nation, which consists of about 300 people in the midst of the Florida Everglades. He is trying to keep that law: the Creator's Law, the Breathmaker's Law.
The Independent Traditional Seminole nation of Florida steadfastly keeps their traditions-language, culture, housing, ceremony, and way of life-against the forces of colonialism, assimilation, globalization and all that eats cultures. The presence of these traditions in the Native community provides a yardstick against which to measure your own values, your own way of life, and your choices. That is the lesson these traditions will teach without speaking. And that is a great gift.
In the center of their chickee (traditional house) Seminoles keep a fire-always, it seems. It is the fire of culture, the fire of life. I am not so different. I tend my fire, that one in the woodstove, which keeps my northern house warm. Watch the fire, nurture it, and it will feed your soul and warm your body. Leave the fire, and it may get away from you. That lesson is worth remembering.
The Panther Clan of the Seminole nation consider the Florida panther their closest animal relative. There are only about fifty of these panthers left. Both the panther and the Seminole have fought for their land and they intend to remain there. But industrialization and the drive for profit are squeezing the lifeblood out of the Everglades, and it's not possible for the Seminole and panther alone to change that.
Two hundred years ago, the Seminoles and the animals had most of the Everglades to themselves. Blooming flowers of every shape and color were intertwined with the textured green of shrubs, grasses, and trees. Small hills rose among the great waterways, in whose fertile soils the Seminoles planted small gardens. In their massive dugout canoes, they travelled as far as Cuba and the Bahamas. At home, they prayed for and feasted on fish and animals, and made their shelter from the great cypress swamps and palm trees. From other plants they made their medicines, and each day they gave thanks to the Creator for their way of life. To the Seminole, like other Indigenous people, the way of life is a ceremony in itself, and they acknowledge it historically and today through a language called Hitchiti.
The Seminoles, it is said, had once been closely affiliated with the Creeks. Their name, Seminoles, came from a Creek word meaning "runaway," or "wild," or alternatively, "people of the distant fire." When they decided to keep to themselves, they started an independent, village-based system of governance. But their land was coveted. First by the Spaniards, who imagined a Fountain of Youth amidst the sea of grass, pink flamingos, blue herons, and brilliantly colored birds, and then by the Americans, who, as time would tell, coveted all.
The Seminole Wars
“You have guns and so have we. You have powder and lead, and so have we. Your men will fight, and so will ours-until the last drop of Seminole blood has moistened the dust of his last hunting ground.”
—Osceola, Seminole leader
In l8l7 (according to the laws of colonialism), Florida became a Spanish possession. And the United States was in an expansionist mood. (Each subsequent colonizer has sought to attain that which they could not-the heart of the Everglades and the souls of the Seminoles.) What was worse to Eurocentric eyes was that the Seminoles had taken in runaway Black slaves. That was a sore point with southern slaveholders. Most of those escaped slaves became members of the community. Even those who lived separately had their own villages, ran their own affairs, and grew their own crops. The Africans were sometimes adopted as members of a Seminole family, and the freeing of blacks was common practice. Mixed-bloods and Blacks became chiefs and sub-chiefs in the regular Seminole settlements. In fact, to this day, there are still, primarily in Oklahoma, Black Seminole families, or Seminole Freedmen, who remain as a bridge between two cultures and histories.
All of this was infuriating to the southern slaveowners, and provided a large part of the impetus for the First Seminole War, fought under the command of one General Andrew Jackson, who was later made military governor of the new territory. Thus provoked, in l8l6, the military sent a detachment into Florida to pursue runaway slaves. Under the command of General Andrew Jackson, a year later they attacked a Seminole village in northwest Florida. So began the Seminole Wars, which lasted from 1817 to 1855. The First Seminole War technically began in 1817 and came to a close two years later when the Spanish ceded Florida to the United States. The Second Seminole War was a military disaster. It required 50,000 soldiers and, between the daunting natural tangle that is the Everglades and the fierce resistance of the Seminoles, the United States suffered an expensive and humiliating defeat. The Second Seminole War, which was waged between 1835 and 1842, took the lives of almost l,500 American soldiers with a federal government price tag of at least $40 million.
In l830, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, giving him the power to remove all eastern Indians from their land to "Indian territory"-government-established areas west of the Mississippi. The Florida Seminoles were to be relocated to Oklahoma, for, among other things, their villages had impeded white settlement of what the local Florida Legislative Council deemed the "fairest part of Florida." In the various dubious treaties and agreements signed over the next years, Jackson tried to force the Seminoles to leave Florida, but as reporter Catherine Caulfield notes,
One young warrior Osceola resisted and inspired others to follow him.… As the deadline for the move to Oklahoma approached they went on the offensive against the troops who had been sent to organize the exodus. A series of surprise attacks in the last days of l835, in which a handful of Indians killed more than a hundred soldiers launched the Second Seminole war, which continued for nearly eight years and was one of the bloodiest, costliest and least successful wars in American history.
In 1837, 33 Seminole leaders, including Osceola, were captured while negotiating under a flag of truce. Osceola later died in captivity, succumbing to complications from malaria. The U.S. Army imported bloodhounds from Cuba in an unsuccessful attempt to track the remaining Seminoles. Even without the dogs, the odds were heavily against the Seminoles. Fifty thousand federal soldiers served in the Second Seminole War, and there were never fewer than 3,800 soldiers in the field at any one time. The Seminoles, by contrast, had no more than 1,500 warriors total.
By 1842, almost 4,000 Seminoles had been shipped west to Oklahoma Indian Territory, and at the close of the war in 1855, less than 500 Seminoles remained in the Everglades and Big Cypress Swamp, north of the Everglades.
In the ten years following the end of the Second Seminole War, Florida's non-Indian population almost doubled, and the newcomers wanted the Indians out of the way. With bribes, bounty hunters, and armed troops, the United States managed by l86l to move 200 more Seminoles to Oklahoma. Finally, the looming Civil War and the western Indian wars forced the U.S. government to end its war against the Seminoles. Three hundred Seminoles remained in the Florida swamps.
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